The iTunes Music Store is 13 years old, and iTunes is still a disaster

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Over the past 16 years, Apple has built a reputation for creating high-quality products. The iPod, iPhone, iPad, and Macintosh are often criticized for being overpriced or poorly positioned for certain use cases. Gamers, in particular, get short shrift on Apple Macs. But no one really argues over Apple device quality — just how much you pay for it.

There are exceptions to every rule, however, and Apple’s most egregious exception, iTunes (or more specifically, the iTunes Music Store) is turning 13 today. As a veteran of the PC industry, I recall the brief halcyon moment when iTunes was actually a useful piece of software for managing a local media collection, particularly back when movie trailers were being released mostly in QuickTime and Windows Media Player had limited codec support compared with other third-party utilities. Then, on April 28 2003, Apple added support for the Apple Music Store. It’s been more-or-less steadily downhill from there.

Today, iTunes is a grab-basket kludge of mishmashed features and poorly organized options. It’s crash-happy, performs remarkably poorly when asked to organize classical music, and has been known to eat large libraries (or parts of them) when asked to synchronize across its own services. It is, as one developer put it, a “toxic hellstew of unreliability” — and that’s coming from someone who uses the Mac version, which really ought to be better behaved than its boorish Windows cousin.

Yes, it certainly did. Repeatedly.

The screenshot above is from my own installation of iTunes for Windows. Since I have an iPhone, not using iTunes isn’t really an option. Clicking on “Connect” gave me the above message. A second click fixed it, a third brought it back again. This is the sort of irritatingly obtuse message that used to be the provenance of Microsoft.

iTunes eats 200MB of RAM to start and close to 400MB of memory once I’ve cycled through each tab once. “For You” is nothing but a full-page ad for Apple Music, which means Apple hijacked one of its primary tabs as a way to sell me on a monthly service partly delivered through a desktop application with the grace and poise of a six-week dead manatee rotting on a Florida beach. After clicking on a few tracks and albums, iTunes has hit 500MB of RAM; clicking “Movies” and then “Books” nudges this over the 600MB threshold. I click on every option (Music, Movies, TV Shows, App Store, Books, Podcasts, and iTunes U) and am not surprised to see that the RAM footprint is edging towards 900MB.

900MB of RAM isn’t much in this day and age; Firefox regularly eats 1.6GB of RAM thanks to various continuing problems that the Mozilla team apparently can’t fix. In iTunes case, however, this bloat is just the easiest way to illustrate the underlying problem: This is an application that stuffs way too much content into a wrapper never meant to hold it.

iTunes’ UI design is horrible for similar reasons: not because it has bad designers, but because they’ve been given an impossible task: cramming way too much functionality into a single app while also making it look “clean.”

iTunes is designed by the Junk Drawer Method: when enough cruft has built up that somebody tells the team to redesign it, while also adding and heavily promoting these great new features in the UI that are really important to the company’s other interests and are absolutely non-negotiable, the only thing they can really do is hide all of the old complexity in new places.

iTunes is the worst part of owning an iPhone. It’s its own argument against using any Apple service. If Tim Cook really has a shred of decency, he’ll celebrate the anniversary by taking the application out back and shooting it in the head before ordering the software team to get back to work on something better.

Tagged In

“the only thing they can really do is hide all of the old complexity in new places.”

This. I cannot count how many times I have had to relearn how to find anything on iTunes after not opening it for a couple of months. Each time everything is rearranged into another fresh hell.

dxun

Good grief – different versions!? I had to relearn how to do anything after I didn’t open *the same* version for a couple of months! What a can of worms this software is. My first and last iPhone was 3GS – and a good part of my perennial hatred for Apple stems from iTunes. Never again.

Zunalter

I was considering moving back over to iPhone this upgrade cycle if nothing compelling shows up from android, but honestly, the thought of having to wrestle with iTunes again makes me think twice.

Justanotherokie

Objective C is a hellish programming language so old and outdated no doubt the small cadre of developers have the ‘It’s just good enough’ mentality. It shows everywhere on OSX related issue.

Cestarian

I think that’s more like the entire mentality behind all apple products “It’s good enough, now lets get back to aesthetics.”

Gowri Sankar

C# anyone guys?

mcdave

Hence Swift – not that either have anything to do with the UX as that’s mostly handled by OSX’s frameworks.

Justanotherokie

Only about 10 years too late

mcdave

Or just in time. With Swift those of us who know what we want our products to do and how they should do it can build the products. The iterations occur between the same pair of ears, no layers of interpretation/assumption required – more AGILE than AGILE! Of course we still need traditional developers for tech assurance but by removing them from the decision chain the design remains intact.

Justanotherokie

You can’t rewrite that Apple Codebase overnight. OSX is derived from (Unix/NExT) OS from the early 80’s as is their file system. That’s what Jobs brought to the table on his return.

Apple’s foundation is rusted. Over the last 5 years Apple has just been piling icing on the cake. All Apple has left is logistics, their vision is gone, it’s just me-too smallball. Logistics only work if you have a growing marketplace.

mcdave

Why would they need to? What’s abundantly clear is that most software technology is massively over-cooked. In the absence of being able to connect with the subject matter experts (as evidenced by a 90+% ROI failure) the technical experts turned inward and developed the development systems themselves in a disastrous, orgy of self-serving, self-interested activity fuelled by the open source community. None of this has benefitted the customer base.
We’re now in a position where the customer gets what the technical experts want, not what they or the subject matter experts need.

You’re right about Apples recent iterative efforts then again designing the last three generations of personal computing is a hard act to follow. The next revolution may not be a device but the method by which they’ve succeeded; i.e. driving product development by the subject matter (design) rather than the technology itself. This way technology won’t become a means to its own end as is currently the case. Swift is an enabler.

Justanotherokie

Evidence iTunes, that bloated POS. Re-Engineering that will be a nightmare. It just works right? It’s probably got more nooks and crannies that will need duplication than Hillary has wrinkles.

mcdave

Not my (or most other Mac owners’) experience. It was only released for Windows because iPods needed iTunes and the addressable market was larger if they extended iTunes to Windows PCs. Now, no iDevices need a host so they should EOL Windows iTunes and trim the Mac version to align with the Apple Music & Video Apps.

Rab

I have refused to update itunes for a couple of years confident in the knowledge that there is an enormous probability the update will break some hard-learned functionality and the roll-back process will loose me the best part of a weekend.
How can a company of their wealth and resources produce such garbage? An absolute pig-in-a-poke.
Oh how history repeats itself (Bill sips coffee with wry smile reading the anniversary section..)

Cestarian

Dude, you ever used Steam?

Joel Hruska

Steam’s UI and discoverability are also pretty terrible, to be sure.

Cestarian

It’s also just generally slow, unresponsive and riddled with bugs. But the thing is that unlike Apple, Valve is an actually respected software company. (Apple is a respected hardware company, by all it’s fans who don’t realize that all Apple’s hardware is made by basically everybody else than Apple themselves)

Valve can do better, it bugs the hell out of me that they don’t. The same thing basically applies to SteamOS. SteamOS didn’t fall short because of Linux shortcomings, but because of Valve’s.

Joel Hruska

Valve is not a software company. That’s a misnomer. Valve is a publisher that happens to occasionally write software.

Seriously. Look at its release history. CS Go? Four years old. Portal 2? Five years old. Left 4 Dead 2? Seven years old. Even DOTA 2 is coming up on three years old.

There is clearly no one at Valve leading a charge to develop new projects. The flat structure seems to mean that people work on things they find interesting until they run into really hard problems, which they then mostly don’t solve.

This is why I think Steam UI has never been improved. Overhauling an entire UI for a project as large as Steam requires hard work, dedication, and a lot of thankless bug fixing. Valve doesn’t like to do the heavy lifting. They get 75-80% of the way to a goal, and then basically say “Screw it.” They use the pursuit of perfection as a way to justify never releasing or finishing things, and most of their IP languishes despite fan involvement and a great desire from users to see new products.

Zunalter

While all true, it is head and shoulders better than origin or ubi or windows 10 for games, et. al.

Joel Hruska

Not GoG, though. GoG is pretty good.

Zunalter

Interesting, I don’t think I have bought anything from there, I will have to check it out.

Joel Hruska

You can download the client and look around it for free, I think. It’s still in beta and not perfect, but I think it’s evolving pretty nicely.

jtibbs

I read this like it was from the episode of Archer, where archer swears hes going to stop drinking. When he gets caught drinking he says “If I stop drinking all together, the collective hangover will literally kill me.”

Elyad Kalanaki

the only thing I use itunes for is to backup my phone, but this was still very amusing to read. I also think it got the ball rolling for me to switch to Samsung

The running vm

iTunes 10.6 was better.

Cestarian

In other news, snow flakes are still snow flakes, and OS X is still the slowest operating system on the consumer market (and outside of it) as everyone would have expected.

mcdave

The article’s about the Windows version of iTunes.

Cestarian

It’s about the iTunes version of iTunes.

Joel Hruska

Gotta agree with Cestarian on this one. iTunes is not a popular product on Windows or Mac.

mcdave

Except many issues around resource management and stability don’t really affect the Mac version. OSX is way more efficient than Windows far better hardware efficiency.

If this really is the case, then it’s more that iTunes was written by Apple for OS X and ported to Windows, it’s a showcase of the ineptitude of their programmers that the Windows port is so bad (and the OS X version isn’t really that much better, problems with windows version go out, problems with OS X kick in), but if it’s any consolation to you, most ports of most software between platforms end up being bad. Programs need to be written from the start to be cross compatible with all the OSes it’s meant to work on or things will just end badly.

But I digress. Windows and Linux can compete on the side of “efficiency”, on just you know, how fast everything runs. Linux wins (like a lot) but Windows also wins on a slightly different spectrum, but in both cases the performance gaps aren’t huge.

(And note that in the latter test, there was one. 1 test that OS X managed to win in, speed wise, but this only happened because it wasn’t running the program correctly (it ignored fsync requests, basically means that postgresql is faster, but as much faster as it is, it is also more unstable, something that you do not want to see in a database))

Just wow… that someone actually thought OS X is efficient. Don’t believe the marketing crap Apple throws at you man, they’re even bigger bullshitters than Microsoft, hell, recently Microsoft has even been using pages from Apple’s book on bullshitting their clients.

Now you might wonder why Apple would allow OS X to be this slow, and stay this slow. And the reason is simply that developing and maintaining an operating system is hard work, it costs money, and because none of their idiotic not-very-savvy users are complaining anyways, and besides isn’t their slogan something like “computers for the dumb”? They just let it slide. I mean it’s the same as not supporting OpenGL very well (for games you know… also some CAD applications, oh wait oops, aren’t all these idiots running Photoshop on OS X? What a mistake. If Adobe got their heads out of their asses and ported Photoshop from OS X to Linux, it would run noticably better there, but it’s ok, it’s on Windows, where if it uses DirectX it’s good, if it uses OpenGL it’s like almost as fast and “efficient” as it would be on linux but not quite) because all these not-very-savvy users aren’t gamurrs, they’re…. People who go to cafes to browse the internet and pretend to be working, a hipster stereotype thing, that’s their target market. People who don’t care about the stuff that’s actually important in an operating system. They see “ooo white, it reflects light, I buy. Oh it costs 600$ more than a laptop that’s not white but has the exact same specs? It must be better then.”

So yeah, and hardware efficiency? What because they have better hardware? or oh wait, yeah that old marketing gimmick, something about “hardware synergy” or something right? “Apple hardware works better because it’s all set up to work together, not with different parts.” Well guess what genius, they’re using the exact same parts as everyone else is, and your laptops i5 will work just as well with a gtx950m as it will with a gtx 960m, the only difference will be that you have a faster graphics card.

Oh and btw if you wondered why OS X’s graphics drivers are absolute s.h.i.t. it’s because they don’t allow Nvidia (or AMD) to have their own proprietary closed source drivers on OS X, Apple is obsessed with having 100% of control over every OS X installation on the planet, giving 0% of control to any user or third party developer. As a business, sure it may seem smart or somehow viable to do that; but only if you can hide this mindset from your customers (or somehow sell it to them as a good thing, which they do. “Less buttons for everyone!”)

Just bah, ok rant over. Apple is shit, OS X is the nastiest turd they’ve made, and iOS comes second as a smaller but just as stinky turd.

mcdave

Ah. There are few zealots like a Linux zealot. It must be so frustrating that the general populace just don’t get what “great” technology is. They just don’t realise that running SQL a bit faster would enrich their lives end as for games, how dare they pick dedicated consoles over cobbled together PCs running a dearth of out-dated lowest-common-denominator tech like OpenGL. Linux, King of the pipsqueaks!

Consumer UX has so little to do with your benchmarks it but does demonstrate how out of touch your POV is.
In between the rants you make some salient comments; lazy ports and generic implementations are the enemy of great tech, shame this is the only way Linux will see any software as its not a commercially viable desktop platform. I guess that’s why you’re so fixated on benchmarks; because there’s no real software available to the point where you’re begging for cheap ports from Adobe.
Rather than compare sloppy cross-platform ports a quick review of genuine native OSX apps (which actually use its abundance of hardware accelerated frameworks) put the others to shame. Try Pixelmator over Photoshop and I love the way a mobile Apple device edits my 4K video whilst “real” computers with more horsepower stutter. Now that’s Apple efficiency.

Cestarian

Heh yeah, I don’t know about zealot, did I say Linux is better than OS X? Yes, but didn’t I also say windows was better than OS X? Yes.

(Just so you know, I don’t like Linux, I just don’t hate Linux is all, I despise OS X and I hate windows, I don’t hate Linux, I think we need a new, better operating system, but at this point in time it is so hard for such a thing to come into being, so much work nobody is ready to do.)

Aren’t you just purposely ignoring my points here?

And it was OS X that ran PostgreSQL faster, not Linux.

Did you look at the benchmarks I gave you? Or don’t know how to read?

Faster OpenSSL? Better for you. Why? Because HTTPS sites will be faster (and you bettered be using HTTPS at every opportunity bro)

Now I don’t know about most of this other stuff, but let me point out what I do know.

PHP Compilation; most websites use PHP, and you load websites by compiling them realtime, so faster browsing.

Himeno and Fhourstones are mathematical applications athat are reading how many floating point operatins per seconds (FLOPS) your system can pull off (which is btw reflective of your processors overall speeds) OS X slower than Linux (especially himeno, the cry…)

On the other benchmark.

Compile bench, how fast you can compile shit might not be very important for day to day use (it is for many programs though, but usually old ones like oh I don’t know… OS X…) but it is suspicious how snailingly slow OS X is here, and it could be reflective of some very brutal inefficiencies in their CPU drivers

Postmark, this is the by far biggest dealbreaker, it is disk transfer rates within which “files are created, deleted, read, and appended to”. Basic file usage, one of the most basic things an OS can do, and should do as well and efficiently as possible. OS X’s low scores in this benchmark alone make OS X a complete turd with 138 tps compared to linux (at it’s worst…) having 4903 tps…. To put this in contrast, look at the differences between HDDs and SSDs yeah? You know why you benefit from the latter. In general today SSDs are just roughly 10x faster than an HDD. How many times faster is LInux than OS X in file transactions? On this benchmark, 39x faster than OS X on a good day, 36x faster on a bad one.

Still think OS X is good for you? Well lets go on. OpenGL, this will be something that matters for all graphical work (yes, ALL cad work, both 2D drawing and 3D modeling and all that shit. Yes pixelmator too)
I’ll take OS X best vs Linux best.

And well, need I go on explaining why the data on these benchmarks is actually very reflective of OS X’s slowness in general use? These are mostly general-use benchmarks even if they have names that are too complex for brains of OS X fans to understand since the names have more than 3 letters.

Why should I give a damn if you like pixelmator over photoshop any more than you give a damn how i use krita over photoshop?

And heh, a mobile apple device editing 4K video while computers with more horsepowers stutter is asstalk, I’ll believe it if I see it, I never will though. Stuttering is mostly caused by inefficiencies in code relating to how the cpu is used, or bad cpu drivers. Apple has that in spades.

mcdave

You’re allowing your opinion of a platform to be skewed by some low-level tokenisations. Why would you ignore real tasks in favour of implications of low-level synthetics?

Here’s an example; one of my dev teams built a UI component with Core Animation, they laughed at it’s inefficiency and poor frame rate and decided they could do better. They built a rough in OpenGL which was way faster, then they added, reflections, then shading, some extra compositing, some physics. The end result was slower, still not as polished, took far longer and required a far larger code base than a few lines of hardware-accelerated CA methods knocked up in the first couple of hours – courtesy of OSX.

Your lowest-common-denominator test methodology ignores the good stuff which is why it’ll never be relevant to any serious appraisal of a product or platform.

Cestarian

No, no I’m not, that’s you. You are relying on your perspective (which can easily be altered with a little placebo) whereas I’m relying on hard data. And how is it that one of your dev teams being a bunch of sillies who thought they could write good opengl code but actually couldn’t have anything to do with any of this?

Core animation is not courtesy of OSX but of Apple. A platform locked piece of shitware, and yes it may be easier to use than OpenGL or DirectX (which is another platform locked not-so shitware) but that comes at a cost of huge limitations which is why your dev team decided to try this to begin with. End of the story being that Core Animation is inefficient crap, but your dev team didn’t have the skill to do better with OpenGL. Bravo.

mcdave

Hard data, which is irrelevant. End of the story is that things are often more complex than tech experts imagine them to be. CA delivers a huge return on investment where feasible. Look at how a gutless 1st gen iPhone delivered a smooth UI that Android phones with an order of magnitude more resources couldn’t match 5 years later (iOS is an OSX derivative).
OpenGL is sluggish, old, and is being replaced as a foundation technology by Metal in OSX (& iOS) even Khronos have moved on to Vulkan.
Amusing though the ranting babble is; might I suggest fewer expletives an more relevant facts.

MisterBlat

“The screenshot above is from my own installation of iTunes for Windows. … This is the sort of irritatingly obtuse message that used to be the provenance of Microsoft.“

Well, “when in Rome” as they say…

mcdave

Works fine on my 2007 iMac. Maybe you need a real OS to handle big apps.

Joel Hruska

You know, it’s actually hilarious that you think the problems with iTunes are actually caused by OS-level issues. They aren’t.

mcdave

So what are they? Bearing in mind; iTunes hasn’t been required for iDevices since late 2011 (despite the troll posts on this blog) and Apple Music never required it, it’s just the desktop client.

Joel Hruska

“Bearing in mind; iTunes hasn’t been required for iDevices since late 2011 ”

I suppose this does depend on how you define “required.” It’s true that you don’t have to use iTunes to install OS updates or activate a device any more. On the other hand, it’s still the only one-stop shop for all things Apple-related. I can manage my playlists and backups with other tools and I can buy things over-the-air from the iPhone itself, but I can’t do *all* the things I might want to do with any application besides iTunes. At least, not as far as I’m aware.

As for iTunes having issues on Macs as well as Windows, I mean, that’s a documented thing. Jim Dalrymple’s problems with iTunes and Apple Music losing huge chunks of his library certainly weren’t caused by Windows problems; he’s a long-time Mac user.

Mac users have iTunes problems, too. And the organizational issues that plague the application certainly have nothing to do with which OS you use. Windows doesn’t make Apple magically cram 2x more stuff into a single application.

mcdave

I’m keen to know what this obscure function is that still requires iTunes.

Never said iTunes on OSX was totally free of tech issues just has far fewer than Windows. Unsurprising given writing apps for your own OS with 1st party frameworks is way more robust and efficient than using someone else’s or writing extra code in lieu.

Design issues are another matter; personally I think being able to push or pull any music I want (my library or Apple’s) to any category/playlist/device is great, other opinions may differ.

Joel Hruska

Last I checked, there are no third-party apps that can purchase from the Apple Store.

If you want to handle that task from a laptop or desktop , you’ll need to use iTunes for purchases. You can manage playlists or file copies from other apps but you can’t buy the content. At least I don’t think you can.

mcdave

What other stores (Google, MS, Sony, Samsung) allow 3rd party apps to purchase? You can use other apps to manage iTunes music content post purchase no more or less than any other content source. Whatever the system, you can only do what developers allow you to do – and Apple are no less proprietary than anyone else.

Joel Hruska

I never said otherwise.

Recall this: The original topic of the conversation was an assertion that the issues with iTunes on Windows were caused by Windows. I pointed to one prominent case where issues with iTunes on the Mac caused problems for *Mac* users and also pointed out that much of what people dislike about iTunes is common between the Mac and Windows platform.

I also noted that while, yes, there are third-party tools that can handle syncing and other capabilities, iTunes remains the one-stop shop for both device management and content purchases.

iTunes isn’t a great application in its current state, and it really deserves a ground-up rethink. It’s issues aren’t confined to Windows PCs. That’s my point — not whether or not it’s better or worse than any Android app.

I’m an iPhone user. I prefer the Apple ecosystem, even with iTunes. That doesn’t mean iTunes couldn’t be better software.

mcdave

So you don’t understand the concept of significance. Oh dear. One platform has users complaining of issues which barely emerge on the other platform which concurs with first hand experience over the last decade. My original comment was it works fine on my Mac. Difference? The platform.

iTunes as just an App. No longer necessary for either device management or content purchases. The solution is just not to use it on Windows. There’s a good chance it’ll be dropped from that platform anyway- it’s done its job.

Fred_EM

MediaMonkey can handle a lot of songs on a Windows PC.

JW

I’ve detested iTunes pretty much from the time I got my first iDevice – a classic iPod. It’s eaten my vast music collection on more than one occasion. I now have an iPad and an iPhone and the only thing I use iTunes for with them – is to back-up (which I don’t trust anyway) and to load documents to my devices. iTunes rarely works as needed, is slow, unresponsive and indeed, a company of the wealth that Apple is, needs to relook this embarrasment.

Comment_Cop

I can confirm itunes is a horrible pig. My PC can handle music production software smoother and quicker than it runs itunes. I mean literally creating music with multiple samples and complex processing of reverb and compression. It can do that better than simply playing a recorded bit of music on itunes.
Kind of crazy when I think about it like that! :D

Jonny Crompton

I can’t understand this, I run iTunes 11.4 on a beat up dual core Celeron desktop on Win 10 with an SSD, and iTunes is loaded in four seconds and works perfect for me. I only sync non iOS devices to it (old iPods) and I have zero issues. I tried opening several tabs like this article mentioned and useage never got above 300 MB according to Resource Monitor. Anyone would think iTunes barely works at all reading this article. Problems are few and far between, at least on 11.4 for me…

Comment_Cop

I don’t know maybe they fixed it now or it likes your setup. But for me it was a hog and very poor performing compared to other much more complex software. I had the same experience as described in this article. My PC is powerful too.

Anyway I don’t use iTunes anymore, I moved on from it.

Jonny Crompton

Fair enough, but I run iTunes 11.4 on five machines, including an Atom tablet with a gig of RAM and it works fine. My desktop opens it in four seconds (SSD) and even two netbooks run it without problem. I’ve had the occasional bug but nothing major….I’ve even ran 9.3 on Zorin OS without too much issue. Give me iTunes over a web app any day

Comment_Cop

I now buy my music from sites like Qobuz and Beatport. Mostly because they offer uncompressed CD quality. I’m surprised iTunes haven’t evolved to offering it yet. The pricing is similar so for me its a no brainer to get the CD quality (or high res) from these sites. Then I have the choice to use any media player to play the files, better media players.

Also for discovering new music and just general listening I use Spotify. Mostly for convenience because it works on all my devices even built into my Samsung TV.

ITunes just fell behind for me especially as I don’t use an iPhone, there was no need for it.

Leif Niclasen

I think iTunes suffer from 2 fundamental problems:
1. Apple is as always desperately trying to abstract the user fom the underlying file-structure. The result is that it is a giant mess between database, original files and database file storage.
2. Apple see their worst product as their flagship, and all other products should be more like itunes (Microsoft has the same problem with Outlook).

mcdave

Consumers should never see a filesystem, it’s not the ’70s anymore.

Leif Niclasen

Well, I don’t care much if the user/consumer can or can not see the filesystem, but what really irritates me, is a program that does something else than you ask for. A harmless sounding command like “Add songs to library” should never be translated to “copy all my music and put it somewhere else on the disk, so that I now have 2 versions of everything.”

mcdave

Uncheck the ‘copy’ option in prefs? Most consumers don’t get file referencing hence the default.

Leif Niclasen

It doesn’t change the fact, that iTunes is not transparent in what it does. I’m just in general a little chocked, that the company that creates such fantastic hardware and operating system, can make 2 pieces of complete crap, like iTunes and Finder.

mcdave

In what way is it not transparent? Do you mean that it’s bad because it isn’t Windows explorer? Odd that someone who claims not to care about filesystems thinks Finder’s crap as opposed to largely irrelevant. Sorry but iTunes (and Apple products in general) isn’t for people who can’t move past files in folders on drives.

Leif Niclasen

Sorry, you lost me there… Can you explain to a neandertahl ( (developer since 1984) where you store your data, if it’s not on a filesystem somewhere?

mcdave

Back to my original reply; just because consumers don’t see a filesystem doesn’t mean there isn’t one. The consumer interacts with the App, the App interacts with the filesystem.

Leif Niclasen

OK, that is where we totally disagree: Having an app that makes the user think it does one thing, but behind the scenes does something totally different, is in my opinion the biggest crime you can commit as a developer.

mcdave

When was iTunes ever marketed as a media file manager? That’s a total assumption on your part, the original Mac saw the media library as a bundle not even an accessible folder.
As a Developer you do realise that most apps integrate 1st & 3rd party code to deliver them differently to the user – that’s kind of the point of development. Good to know you wouldn’t touch anything Google though.

SilentGal

I have never brought anything from apple due to its crappy software and how much the products cost. I have had to do things for people who own iphones etc and it is the worse.

i will never understand the hype for apple products at all since i always by off brand items which are good quality so they last longer for less price

I didnt really fall for anyone elses. I dont need bloatware software of that. The other brands tend to have no install of software at all. Pretty much if it is cheap and somewhat reliable then i will take it over others.

I mean you reply sounds like this. If you dont by the Most expensive brand of toilet paper and go for a cheaper open then you fell for someone elses.

mcdave

Sounds like but wasn’t, cost wasn’t mentioned. “Does the same thing for less” is still hype, still a marketing line & usually a false one. Either way you were led into a decision based purely on assumption, you bagged a product range without ever using it. Now that’s powerful marketing.

SilentGal

OK i will clarify even more then. Does it play music, and can you ring and text. That is all i need so it pretty much does the same thing for my needs since i couldn’t careless about internet access or any of those other features. Yes i should have added this in but i didn’t think it was going to be picked apart to say it was all powerful marketing.

mcdave

Your clarification changes nothing, you panned a platform & a product you’ve never used rather than just say you don’t need it. Funny thing is, if you’ve never owned a product how do you know you don’t need it? Many people “know” what they’ve never done, it’s a social disease.

M S i N Lund

– Apple are the kings of usability!!

– iTunes…

– *silence*

Daniel Glass

Even just managing local music (I’ve been ripping from CD to ALAC for like 10 years now) has gotten steadily worse. Every so often, for no reason, iTunes just loses albums. I like my iPod Classic, because it just does what I need to, but as soon as I get around to it I’m deleting it all, getting rid of iTunes, re-ripping to FLAC, and loading it all on the 128GB mSD card in my Lumia 950.

Fred_EM

Try Plex. Maybe get a lifetime license.
Not cheap, but also has nice apps for iPad and iPhone and Android as well.

Daniel Glass

Why would I use a streaming app? I love listening to CD quality music via USB link.

mcdave

No single point of failure there then! Some people complain about old iTunes whilst not being able to think beyond the filesystem.

Daniel Glass

The library in question will be on disc, at least two computers, backups, and the phone sd card, I think it’ll be set.

preilly2

I have had iTunes take my entire music and video collection (carefully organized into folders on my iPod just the way I wanted it), and absolutely demolish it, turning it into a nightmare of unusable, arbitrary chaos. Never again.

Fred_EM

iTunes is a good reason to get an even faster 10nm core i7 once that one is out coupled with some X-Point memory and lots of fast 3D NAND memory.
.

Except you can’t get rid of something you don’t have. If you really had an iPhone you’d know that iTunes hasn’t been necessary for nearly 5 years now. Recently iCloud backup and Apple Music library sync meant iTunes is redundant and 3rd party media player options have been around for years anyway. You’d know this if you had an iPhone.

hapkiman

I carry an iPhone 6 as my personal phone, and a Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge which is my work phone. I use Google Play, Poweramp, Doubletwist on the S7, and iTunes on my iPhone very regularly and haven’t had any of these problems you describe (I just checked and I have 348 Albums, 10.48GB of music in iTunes), and I’ve never seen that error screen. iTunes just has always worked for me with no snafus. And I run with my iPhone at least 4 times a week listening to music through iTunes.. I cant even remember how long I’ve been using iTunes, probably at least 10 years, but not everyone hates it. I find it simple and kind of plain yes (Google Play Music is a little sleeker and more “cool” looking), but I don’t let stuff like that bother me. Maybe I’m just too easy going….

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